Now, the jackpot has vanished, and the suffering will only increase. The campuses spent years suffering financially (relative to their peers) in hopes that Scott’s master plan would lead to a jackpot in 2024. With a shorter duration - say, eight or 10 years - the Pac-12 would have renegotiated its media rights before the Big Ten stepped to the table this spring, thereby locking USC and UCLA into an agreement.Īnd just three years ago, Scott turned down an offer from ESPN to take over Pac-12 Networks distribution and forge a long-term partnership on Tier 1 rights. Scott’s decision to sign a 12-year contract with ESPN and Fox locked the conference into an agreement that has proved its undoing. Jon Wilner of the Wilner Hotline spells out the precise reasons Larry Scott crushed the Pac-12: He is, by far, the man most responsible for the conference’s downfall.Īgain, we know about DirecTV and the Pac-12 Networks, but just to be clear, we need to know the more precise reason the Pac-12 was standing by the side of the road while USC and UCLA packed their bags for the Big Ten. Kliavkoff might be guilty of underestimating the severity of the threat of USC leaving, and that’s a fair criticism, but we can all agree Larry Scott created the conditions under which the Pac-12 was ripe for the plucking. USC leaving is a crushing blow, and Larry Scott created a situation conducive to this collapse.
The Pac-12 is almost certainly facing a diminished future with reduced media rights value and decreased national prestige. However, Kliavkoff couldn’t save the conference itself - at least as we have known it. He got out of the San Francisco rental agreement and saved the conference a ton of money. George Kliavkoff spent his first year as Pac-12 commissioner undoing the damage Scott did. We know Scott paid far too much rent in San Francisco and that his champagne and caviar tastes were wasteful and extravagant for a league that needed to find cost savings. We know the Pac-12 Networks were a disaster in terms of distribution and a net-negative in terms of programming content. We know Larry Scott couldn’t fix the DirecTV mess.
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